


The existential pleasures of engineering

by Naraht



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Character Study, Childhood, Gen, NASA
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-07
Updated: 2010-07-07
Packaged: 2017-10-10 10:46:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/98902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/pseuds/Naraht
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur Weasley has always wanted to be an engineer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The existential pleasures of engineering

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to my beta-readers, starlady and schemingreader, who helped me with a fandom in which I have only a casual acquaintance with canon. Any remaining errors are my own.
> 
> I've borrowed the title of this story from Samuel Florman's excellent book of the same name.

There is a word for Muggles who do wondrous things. Things of which the wizarding world can only dream; things of which most of the wizarding world is barely cognizant. The word is from the Latin, kin to _ingenuity_ and _ingenious_. It sparkles with creativity, adventure, daring. It bears tales of a world that he can never inhabit.

Arthur Weasley has always wanted to be an engineer.

***

As a young boy he used to loiter in places frequented by Muggles, wandering the streets of his small market town and watching them go about their business, doing his best to be inconspicuous in his ill-matched and salvaged clothes. As the night drew in, he found himself standing in the emptying market square. His breath became visible as he lingered there, looking skyward at the contrails that were illuminated by the setting sun. Overhead, somewhere, there had been an _aeroplane_.

_Aeroplane_. The very word was foreign and strange on his tongue. It was not his. It was the inheritance of the Muggles who casually advertised flights to Greece and to Italy in the local travel agents, who piled boxes of model kits in the dusty plate glass windows of the toyshop. _Aeroplane_, as if just anyone could walk in and possess its secrets.

One day he was sitting in a bus shelter waiting for a bus that he would never ride. Just to watch it go past, just to ponder the _engine_ that drove it onwards. A young boy his age was sitting beside him, complaining to his mother about something incomprehensible to Arthur. When they went, he left a tattered magazine behind on the ground. On its cover it showed an _aeroplane_, silvery and graceful and bigger than Arthur had ever seen. He snatched up the magazine, folded it, and tucked it inside his corduroy jacket.

It was not until he was safely in his room at home that he allowed himself to look at it. It was called _Popular Mechanics_. Reverently, he stroked it with a careful hand, smoothing down its rippled cover. "Popular" was a word that Arthur understood but _mechanics_ was almost impenetrable to him.

Dimly, he was aware that _mechanics_ referred to things like a carpenter's plane, to the hinges on a door and the seesaw that children used on the playground. Yet Muggles used the word for clocks and for the _engine_ that powered their omnibuses. It was inexplicable. You could open the casing of a clock. He had done it; there was nothing inside, nothing but evanescent spells that could never be seen or grasped. It was nothing like the _mechanisms_ that seemed to govern all of Muggle life.

Through that one magazine he learned about far more than the workings of _aeroplanes_. Stars that shone in the darkness without the touch of a wand. Matter that formed itself into galaxies with no need for a word of command, obedient to laws beyond the laws of magic. The Muggles had no need of that hypothesis. Arthur was stunned.

In the pages of that issue of _Popular Mechanics_ he learned about something so utterly beyond his ken that for some time he could not bring himself to believe it. Muggle _engineers_ were working to send men to the moon. It was inconceivable. It was amazing. The article said nothing about magic. It showed something called a _rocket_, built to take them there, but it said nothing about magic. The picture, spread across two pages, was of a silvery, towering, mythical creation, breathing oxygen and fire like a harnessed dragon, waiting patiently to hurl men into the sky. It certainly looked like magic to him. Arthur Weasley had never even had the chance to see a Muggle firework up close.

Leaving home to go to Hogwarts was a thrilling adventure. Arthur loved to visit King's Cross with its vaulted arches and steam-breathing trains. Platforms 9 and 10 interested him far more than Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, but even so he boarded the Hogwarts train with only a pang of reluctance. Eager to learn, he was confident that his new school would unravel all the mysteries of life.

Wandering the stone-tracery cloisters of Hogwarts, his head spun with thoughts of _rockets_ and _sockets_, two mysterious words whose subjects seemed equally strange and wonderful to him.

He was to be sadly disappointed. He was not able to start Muggle Studies until his third year, and in the library he only got lost amid the shelves of ancient tomes. He couldn't find anything that he was looking for.

The kindly librarian, who could conjure books from faraway libraries in Istanbul and Milwaukee without even looking up from her own tome, had never even heard of _Popular Mechanics_.

"Oh no, dear," she said, slightly flustered, "there must be some mistake."

And she was so sweet and so confused that he hadn't the heart to ask any further. He took a handful of toffees from the bowl on her desk and left with three profusely-illustrated books on dragons. One of them had a dragon breathing fire in living colour right on the cover, but Arthur tucked the books into his trunk and paid them no more mind until he was sent an owl to say that they were overdue.

In his third year he was finally allowed to start Muggle Studies. He was filled with joy at the thought that he would at last be able to learn the truth that the wizarding world seemed to have kept from him all this time. At the end of the first class, which was about something completely different, the teacher asked whether there were any questions. Arthur stuck his hand up instantly.

"Please, sir," he said, without waiting to be called upon, "can you tell us about the Muggles who are going to walk on the moon?"

The class was swept with laughter. His teacher turned from a tattered map that was pink with the memory of the slowly-dissolving British empire.

"Don't tell stories," he said severely. "No one can walk on the moon."

Arthur Weasley never told stories. Earthly lands where the sun never set were nothing to him. _Popular Mechanics_ told him that days on the moon were ever so long, white with the pitiless, majestic blaze of the sun.

***

No wizard has ever walked on the moon. It is, Arthur eventually concludes, for the simple reason that no wizard has ever wanted to. The Ministry of Magic, so caught up with its petty regulations and its fear of the Muggle world, has never bothered to look beyond its rooftops and to dream. It is the Muggles, with their quaint, mysterious, ingenious _mechanisms_\--ticking and turning gears that one can hold in the hand, air-breathing _engines_ larger than a house--it is they who will inherit the stars.

***

 

"Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic."  
\--Arthur C. Clarke


End file.
